Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 34

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 34 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Thomas Powers
The first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper: paper can be lost or stolen or simply inherited by the wrong people; if you really want to keep something secret, don't write it down.
- Thomas Powers
Collection: Writing
Image of Sean O Faolain
Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.
- Sean O Faolain
Collection: Writing
Image of Sean O Faolain
The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.
- Sean O Faolain
Collection: Writing
Image of Sean O Faolain
The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.
- Sean O Faolain
Collection: Writing
Image of Max Bemis
Cut the crap. Just don't try to be anything that you aren't, have ambition but when it comes to lyrics especially just be honest and write from the heart almost to an awkward degree, at least that's what works for me.
- Max Bemis
Collection: Writing
Image of Richard Lederer
Today we speak, but first we spoke; faucets leak, but never loke. Today we write, but first we wrote; we bite our tongues, but never bote.
- Richard Lederer
Collection: Writing
Image of Richard Lederer
It is indeed acceptable practice to sometimes split an infinitive. If infinitive-splitting makes available just the shade of meaning you desire or if avoiding the separation creates a confusing ambiguity or patent artificiality, you are entitled to happily go ahead and split!
- Richard Lederer
Collection: Writing
Image of Jane Haddam
Listen to advice. You don't know how many writer's conferences I've taught at where at least half the audience fights all the conventions of the field.
- Jane Haddam
Collection: Writing
Image of Jane Haddam
I'd like to write a history, maybe of the Reformation.
- Jane Haddam
Collection: Writing
Image of Michele Cassou
Painting for process is the visual equivalent of journal writing, done not for the sake of being seen or published, but purely for the telling itself.
- Michele Cassou
Collection: Writing
Image of Lisa Alther
I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn't all that important to me.
- Lisa Alther
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen Leigh
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer.
- Stephen Leigh
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen Leigh
Which isn't the truth, you understand. At least you understand that in your head...but not always in your heart.
- Stephen Leigh
Collection: Writing
Image of Annie Leonard
Everywhere I go, I meet people ready for change. People who are fed up with the exhaustion that comes from devoting one's life to the work-watch-spend treadmill. People who know in their hearts that it's wrong to treat the planet and whole groups of people as disposable. People who are challenging the bogus stories we've been fed for years and are writing their own about hope and love and working together to build a better future for everyone.
- Annie Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Irving Wallace
Even if I could not earn a penny from my writing, I would earn my livelihood at something else and continue to write at night.
- Irving Wallace
Collection: Writing
Image of Norman Rush
The characters write the plot. Their natures do.
- Norman Rush
Collection: Writing
Image of Eric Gill
Writing is in fact an entirely outworn, decayed and corrupt convention whose chief & most conspicuous character is its monumental witness to the conservatism, laziness and irrationality of men and women.
- Eric Gill
Collection: Writing
Image of Virpi Hameen-Anttila
Writing wasn't easy to start. After I finally did it, I realized it was the most direct contact possible with the part of myself I thought I had lost, and which I constantly find new things from. Writing also includes the possibility of living many lives as well as living in any time or world possible. I can satisfy my enthusiasm for research, but jump like a calf outside the strict boundaries of science. I can speak about things that are important to me and somebody listens. It's wonderful!
- Virpi Hameen-Anttila
Collection: Writing
Image of Eliza Leslie
Recollect that to a woman who gets her living by her pen, 'time is money,' as it is to an artist. Therefore, encroaching on her time is lessening her income. And yet how often is this done (either heedlessly or selfishly) by persons professing to be her friends, and who are habitually in the practice of interrupting her in her writing hours.
- Eliza Leslie
Collection: Writing
Image of Brian Aldiss
There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.
- Brian Aldiss
Collection: Writing
Image of Jim Tully
Long patience and application saturated with your heart's blood-you will either write or you will not-and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.
- Jim Tully
Collection: Writing
Image of Ken Tucker
Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.
- Ken Tucker
Collection: Writing
Image of Raymond Aron
In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.
- Raymond Aron
Collection: Writing
Image of Tate Taylor
As a writer, as much as I try, I can't stop writing female characters. They have so much more to offer; they have to wear so many different hats. There's so much wonderful gray matter in a female's life that it just makes for a stronger character.
- Tate Taylor
Collection: Writing
Image of Tate Taylor
I met this woman who was a hundred, this housekeeper, a hundred years old. I interviewed her. She just told me about her whole life. She's like, 'I can't read, I can't write; I can tell you who I was working for, and I can tell you the year, but who was president?
- Tate Taylor
Collection: Writing
Image of Tate Taylor
To write, you have to know how to act and know about directing. To act, you also need to know how to write and direct.
- Tate Taylor
Collection: Writing
Image of Dennis Green
It's pretty easy to think of the idea of a story, and maybe even to write a scene or two, but understanding the ebb and flow of a narrative, where to leave the little clues your protagonist (and reader) need, while playing fair, takes a lot more skill and patience than you might think.
- Dennis Green
Collection: Writing
Image of Mary Abigail Dodge
One ought not to write for money, but I consider it a first duty after one has written to exact the highest possible price. It is not a matter which concerns only the writer, but all writers.
- Mary Abigail Dodge
Collection: Writing
Image of Maxine Kumin
We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.
- Maxine Kumin
Collection: Writing
Image of Maxine Kumin
To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.
- Maxine Kumin
Collection: Writing
Image of Maxine Kumin
I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.
- Maxine Kumin
Collection: Writing
Image of Maxine Kumin
My writing time needs to surround itself with empty stretches, or at least unpeopled ones, for the writing takes place in an area of suspension as in a hanging nest that is almost entirely encapsulated.
- Maxine Kumin
Collection: Writing
Image of Brian Stableford
People are certainly impressed by the aura of creative power which a writer may wear, but can easily demolish it with a few well-chosen questions. Bob Shaw has observed that the deadliest questions usually come as a pair: "Have you published anything?" - loosely translated as: I've never heard of you - and "What name do you write under?" - loosely translatable as: I've definitely never heard of you.
- Brian Stableford
Collection: Writing
Image of Cornelius Eady
Writing a lyric is writing a lyric, whether it's sung or recited. Perhaps the question to ask should be, has playing in a band for three years affected you? The answer to that is you bet.
- Cornelius Eady
Collection: Writing
Image of Ilya Ehrenburg
It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be.
- Ilya Ehrenburg
Collection: Writing
Image of Frederic Raphael
Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.
- Frederic Raphael
Collection: Writing
Image of Larry L. King
Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.
- Larry L. King
Collection: Writing
Image of Lucille Clifton
I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.
- Lucille Clifton
Collection: Writing
Image of Alfred Kazin
The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
- Alfred Kazin
Collection: Writing
Image of Alfred Kazin
What happens whenever we convert a writer into a symbol is that we lose the writer himself in all his indefeasible singularity, his particular inimitable genius.
- Alfred Kazin
Collection: Writing
Image of C. J. Cherryh
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
- C. J. Cherryh
Collection: Writing
Image of C. J. Cherryh
Writing day and night for months… that’s hard.
- C. J. Cherryh
Collection: Writing
Image of Richard Ben Cramer
I'm out there to clean the plate. Once they've read what I've written on a subject, I want them to think, 'That's it!' I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they've written a story, nobody will ever try it again.
- Richard Ben Cramer
Collection: Writing
Image of Sharon Needles
You can't open your presents 'til you write your thank-you letters.
- Sharon Needles
Collection: Writing
Image of Wayne Shorter
Play and write music the way you want the world to be.
- Wayne Shorter
Collection: Writing
Image of Wayne Shorter
I'm learning more about life when I'm playing too, and writing music. I'm learning more about life, the connection.
- Wayne Shorter
Collection: Writing
Image of Takeshi Kitano
Eventually, this is how I would like to be remembered at the end of my career: He was never the best in anything he did - comedy, acting, filmmaking, writing, etc. But nobody was better at doing different things at the same time than he was.
- Takeshi Kitano
Collection: Writing
Image of Bertrand Meyer
Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine...) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.
- Bertrand Meyer
Collection: Writing